Process ·
Why I Leave the Words In
Sometimes a painting needs a word the way a scream needs air. I've stopped painting over them.
If you look closely at some of my canvases you will find words in them — a plea, a name for what happened, sometimes just ENOUGH in letters that could not stay quiet. Early on I painted over them, because I thought fine art was supposed to be wordless. I do not believe that anymore.
The words arrive at the same temperature as the paint. When a feeling is too direct for symbolism, it comes out as language, and sanding it away always felt like asking the painting to be more polite than the life that made it. The tradition agrees with me, from cave walls to Basquiat: when the mark needs to speak, let it.
So now the words stay, half-buried, the way they are in a person. You find them the way you find anything true about someone — by standing close, and by looking a little longer than is comfortable.